Hooray! My Halo Quilt is Finished!

 YOU GUYS!!!  Today is August 20th, and I finished my first quilt of the year yesterday.  I keep looking out my window for the parade but they must be stuck in traffic somewhere...  Surely there will be fireworks, or at least I'll get a mention on the news tonight???  😐. Seriously -- does anyone else feel a little anticlimactic about finally finishing a quilt, or is it just me?  So much work and effort, and then it's just OVER.  It feels so abrupt!

My 66 x 66 Halo Quilt Finish, Pattern by Jen Kingwell

I started this project in mid-March, so it took me five months from start to finish to cut, piece, quilt, label, and bind it.  The pattern for this quilt is available in Jen Kingwell's Jenny From One Block pattern booklet and there's a set of acrylic templates for the Halo quilt sold separately that are worth their weight in gold.  The curved patches for Halo can be cut with a 28 mm rotary cutter (a larger diameter blade is too big to follow the curves, but a smaller diameter blade is too shallow to glide along the edge of the acrylic templates -- the screw holding the blade in place would get in the way).  The other product I highly recommend for this project is Odif Grippy, a spray-on translucent nonslip coating for the acrylic templates that greatly reduces their tendency to slide on the fabric when you need them to stay put for accurate cuts (this post contains affiliate links).  

Halo is suitable for either hand or machine piecing; I hand pieced just one block just to see if I liked it better than machine piecing.  The verdict?  Hand piecing these blocks is easier but slower than doing it by machine, and I wanted to get this done as quickly as possible so I opted for machine piecing the rest of the blocks.  I used lots of Karen Kay Buckley's Shorter Perfect Pins to machine piece all of those curves.

Halo Pattern Booklet, Halo Templates and Tilda Pie In the Sky Fat Eighths

The Tilda Pie in the Sky fabrics pictured above were my starting point for this quilt, but I pulled lots and lots of fabrics from my stash, from my scrap bins (and from the treasure trove of scraps sent to me by Nann!).  What most intrigued me about Jen Kingwell's original version of this quilt was the way her quilt initially seems "random scrappy," but carefully planned elements reveal themselves on closer inspection (Most blocks are scrappy, but several blocks are planned.  Several blocks are planned to create an entire matching circle with a matching ring where the corners come together, and several other blocks are planned to create a scrappy circle with a solid matching ring).  She set general guidelines for value placement within her blocks (such as generally using darker/higher contrast fabrics for the rings and lighter value/lower contrast fabrics for background patches), but then only followed those "rules" about 60-70% of the time.  This resulted in a really interesting effect where some rings, circles and squares come forward visually in the composition and others appear to recede.  I attempted to recreate these "special effects" in my own version of the quilt and I'm pleased with how that turned out.

Halo, Modern Double Wedding Ring, and Baby Moose Quilts

Hey there, Quilter Peeps!  Behold, my Halo quilt top is finally nearing completion:

Center Blocks Sewn Together, Border Blocks In Progress

I hesitate to set personal sewing goals with actual deadlines, but doesn't it look like I could get this quilt top finished by the end of this week?  Now that I've said that out loud, my house will probably be carried off to Oz by a tornado.  Or my sewing machine will blow up.  I'm not even sure which of those scenarios would be more catastrophic -- that would depend on how backed up my Bernina dealer is for repairs, and whether or not there are any good quilt shops in Oz.

For those who haven’t seen this one before, Halo is a pattern by Jen Kingwell that is sold in the pattern booklet Jenny From One Block, available on Amazon here.  (This post contains affiliate links).  If you’re local here in Charlotte, North Carolina, the QuiltPatch shop in Matthews has been offering classes for this quilt (taught by the fabulous Teresa Raleigh), but if you’re already comfortable with curved piecing you will do just fine on your own with the pattern as I did.  The Halo acrylic template set is optional but really helpful for accurate cutting of these shapes, along with a 28 mm rotary cutter (the standard 45 mm rotary cutting blades don’t work well along curved edges).

It never ceases to amaze me how much smaller a quilt gets when the blocks are actually sewn together compared to how big it looks when the individual blocks are stuck on the design wall side by side.  All of those quarter inch seam allowances really add up.  Or rather, they really “subtract up” from the size of the quilt top.  So much work for such a relatively small lap quilt!  I think this is supposed to finish at 66” square.  Well, thank goodness I wasn’t trying to enlarge it to King size this time!

I always enjoy making blocks more than sewing them together, for whatever reason.  Maybe I’m just impatient by the time I’ve finished making enough blocks.  Still, these went together without too much trouble, just careful pinning where the seams need to match up.

Making Blocks is More Fun Than Sewing Them Together

So now all 36 Halo blocks have been sewn together into the main body of the quilt top and I'm just working on those rectangular pieced border blocks.  Which, by the way, is an interesting design choice from pattern designer Jen Kingwell -- the border blocks complete the half circles that would otherwise land on the outer edges of the quilt, deemphasizing and obscuring the block construction in favor of rings and squares that seem to float on a scrappy pieced background.  The borders also enlarge the quilt to a more useful size and create outer edges that can be easily bound without fretting about losing any triangle points or turning rings into flat tires.

That’s about all I have to say about Halo for now.  So let’s have a glimpse of the most recent client’s quilt fresh off my long arm frame:

Tara Faughnan’s Double Wedding Ring for Cheryl

Now, you only get a sneak peek at this one, because this quilt is still on a UPS truck headed back to my client Cheryl in Minnesota.  This is Tara Faughnan’s Double Wedding Ring pattern, and Cheryl’s version is a massive king size made up in Cherrywood hand dyed solid fabrics.

Glimpse of Cheryl's Double Wedding Ring Quilt

I just love the color palette Cheryl created for this one!  This quilt is truly magnificent in person.  I used Hobbs Tuscany Cotton/Wool batting for Cheryl’s DWR and quilted it with YLI 40 Tex cotton thread in variegated Pastels.  Pattern designer Tara Faughnan was new to me before Cheryl sent me this quilt, but I checked out her Instagram and her online shop and I really like her work.  

Nann's Scrappy Largesse, Halo Quilt Progress + A Mini Curved Piecing Tutorial

I don't know about you, but when I've been slogging along forever on a project, trying to combine the same old scraps from my scrap bins in new ways to create blocks that don't look exactly like all the others on my design wall, there's nothing like a fresh injection of someone else's scraps to make the work feel fresh and exciting again.  

A month or so ago, Nann who blogs at With Strings Attached mentioned to me that she'd just finished reading a 1932 novel called The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow.  When I expressed interest in reading the book, she offered to mail me her copy -- and she stuffed the flat rate postage box full of fabric scraps!!  I felt like I'd hit the scrappy jackpot!  I've been working in as many of Nann's scraps as possible and having a grand time with it.  Don't you love this sweet Wizard of Oz fabric?  The orange and blue arcs, pink quarter circle, blue and white dot, larger blue floral quarter circle, and the pink mini floral print are all Nann's fabrics in the block below.

This Block Contains 5 Scraps from Nann

In the block below, the yellow floral HSTs surrounding the blue center square are definitely Nann's, and I think that curved tumbler patch at the bottom that has sprigs of yellow flowers on a white background might also be from Nann.

Yellow Floral Print HSTs are Also Scraps from Nann

Although I've been busy long arm quilting this month, I've also had more social sewing opportunities on my calendar lately and that has really helped me keep the momentum going with this project.  Below you can see I have my Jen Kingwell Block Wrap all packed up with six different blocks planned out, ready to piece at a recent guild Sit & Sew event (this post contains affiliate links).  

Halo Quilt Value Study: Making a Messy Start

Happy Weekend, quilters!  I have an itty bitty amount of progress on my new Halo quilt to share with you today.  For those who missed my earlier post about this NewFO project, Halo is a Jen Kingwell pattern that can be found in her Jenny From One Block pattern booklet, available on Amazon here (this post contains affiliate links).

Unsewn Halo Blocks On My Design Wall

For the last couple of weeks, I've been working on cutting out shapes and rearranging them on my design wall without any sewing.  When I searched #haloquilt on Instagram, I found lots of different versions of this quilt, in all kinds of colorways.  What struck me immediately was that it's the muddled values in Jen Kingwell's original version that drew me in, the way that her "halo rings" appear to come forward in some places and recede in others, creating an illusion of depth.  Other quilters have made some very striking and modern versions of this quilt by increasing the value contrast, limiting the color palette, or restricting themselves to solids, but I was really intrigued by the way Jen broke the conventional "quilt police" rules about value and contrast in her quilt, creating something that feels fresh and modern but also somehow nostalgic and vintage.  I want to recreate that in my version of the quilt.

Jen Kingwell's 66 x 66 Halo Quilt

I printed a full page, grayscale photo of Jen's quilt and taped it up above my cutting table so I can refer to it as I'm chopping up my fabric pieces:

Grayscale Photo of Jen Kingwell's Halo Quilt

It's so much easier to see what's going on with value when you take color out of the equation!